


Scenes From A Marriage

by louwouldapprove



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 18th Century, M/M, Marriage, Trans!Crowley, gay culture, jack sheppard - Freeform, mollyhouses, the worlds not falling apart, trans jack sheppard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:22:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21634345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/louwouldapprove/pseuds/louwouldapprove
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley "marry" each other in a mollyhouse in 18th century London.This work is part of The World's Not Falling Apart, a series collaboration with jackmarlowe.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 23





	Scenes From A Marriage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/gifts).



_I found between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner, and using their Hands indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the voices of Women. O, Fie, Sir! – Pray, Sir. – Dear Sir. Lord, how can you serve me so? – I swear I’ll cry out. – You’re a wicked Devil. – And you’re a bold Face. – Eh ye little dear Toad! Come, buss! – Then they’d hug, and play, and toy, and go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be marry’d, as they call’d it._  
\--Samuel Stevens, constable of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, 14 Nov 1725.

There was a dress. It was not the thin red shift that Crowley had purchased as a joke sometime in the late 1670s, which he sometimes wore hoisted up up around his knees when in his rooms with Aziraphale as if he was a moll tempting men at the corner. This dress was blue, brocaded, with white thread embroidery, lace, and beads. Blue and yellow dresses were popular in the American colonies, for weddings. White hadn’t really come into fashion yet--Mary, Queen of Scots, had worn white at her wedding, but she was not thought well of generally and so it wasn’t common. Aziraphale had commissioned the dress discreetly at a tailor of some repute. Crowley did not see it until the day before.

  
Crowley had purchased a ring, a pearl brooch, a smart jacket, a cravat, and a length of ribbon for Aziraphale, one after the other, over a period of about a hundred years (the brooch, which had been purchased before he had even touched Aziraphale, was something he persuaded himself that he had bought for personal use until sometime in the 1610s, when he let himself admit that it had always been for the angel).

  
In King James’ time, and earlier, there had been places for men who fucked men, and men who dressed as women, and women who were understood to be men, could find each other. The moors had always been there, and would be until houses crowded them out; alleyways and the backs of certain taverns had always been places where one man could look at another as he made water and communicate via gesture that he desired something. There had been a place run by a character who called herself Bugg Acton, after the Buggery Act of Henry VIII, that was around for twenty years and which Crowley had taken Aziraphale to more than once. But it was in the eighteenth century when mollyhouse culture of drag and shows and petticoats became visible--partly because there were more newspapers in which people could accuse each other of being buggers, and partly because there were more self-appointed constables and meddling moral societies that shut houses down.

  
The place they were married, Mother Clap’s, would be shut down in just a couple of years, and Clap and several of her customers would be imprisoned, pilloried, and/or hung. But in the meantime every night there was a show. Aziraphale had been the one to lead Crowley to it, on the advice of a friend who called herself Plump Nelly and who had a small coffee house of her own in Giltspur Street. She’d been holding salons for a while, and Aziraphale had been going there for the shows. Nelly had an astonishing voice. She looked like a noblewoman, because she sewed finely. Everyone who went there dressed as a lady or gentleman, even if they were really just a maid or footman or thief or professional kept boy. Their clothes were made of fabric lifted off the ships at the pier. Aziraphale liked going because of the way everyone treated one another like family and because their taste in music was similar to his. Nelly’s house was one of the less bawdy molly houses. She had suggested one night to a guest who was getting handsy with her that he go to Mother Clap’s if he wanted to mess around. Aziraphale had thought immediately of Crowley and said, what’s Mother Clap’s?

  
Aziraphale and Crowley went, almost as soon as it opened. Crowley had made friends at once with Margaret Clap (not her Christian name), the proprietor, who had a loud laugh and played a game of backgammon that was legendary long before she purchased land with the proceeds from a particularly lucrative affair with an anonymous well-placed nobleman. Margeret--called Mother-- had a foul mouth to rival Crowley’s, and loved the faggots that frequented her house. As far as the Crown or the Bailey ever knew, she was a legitimate woman married in a legitimate ceremony to a legitimate man. Nobody really ever saw her supposed husband, John Clap, and it was such a made up name that several mollies spread the not unreasonable rumor that John and Margaret were in fact the same person. But she looked like a woman to everyone, not-mollies, who met her on the street. It made it difficult to accuse her of any dreadful wrongdoing, because married women were not supposed to enjoy the kinds of conversation or social milieus she enjoyed, or host the kinds of parties she did. She used her relative social capital for good. Her testimony as a married woman, early on in her venture, helped to get a young man named Derwin out of jail.

  
Mock marriages at Mother Clap’s and other mollyhouses were common. Marrying in general was a popular concept--it was slang for sex, but also for more serious partnerships, which made it confusing sometimes when a molly introduced her man as a “husband”, since it could either mean “husband for the night” or “this man has had possession of my heart since I was sixteen”. Mock marriages at mollyhouses happened every night. They could be anything from a shouted declaration to the house, followed by fucking in the adjacent room, to an elaborate costumed ceremony where each of the bride’s friends gathered with flowers or food and wine to pay tribute to the couple. Later historians would analyze the way homosexual culture supposedly aped straight domestic life, and imply these scenes were sort of tragic, but bell hooks also wrote that somewhat mediocre essay about Paris Is Burning. Somehow, academics not in the know continued to misread the level of self-knowledge and irony that mollies, faggots, trans women always have had about themselves. It was serious and not, knowing and sly and funny and sincere. There were also mock birth ceremonies, with dolls, or with friends considered daughters, and sometimes a molly would give a mock funeral for a beau who had dumped her, or there would be a real funeral for a beau who had been hanged or lost at sea. They took the forms of the world at large, but anyone would agree--including Aziraphale--that a mock marriage put on with donated pilfered goods and handicrafts in the second-floor parlor of a mollyhouse was more beautiful than the wedding of a prince. Also, louder.

  
Crowley had said something silly about marriage in 1621 or so after Aziraphale had come inside him for the fourth time in a row on a sunny afternoon in the middle of a wood that had been recently reserved for the Crown. Crowley had said things in a similar vein before-- “make me your wife” being one of the phrases he could cry out distinctly even when other language was lost to him-- but on that particular day he asked a particular question.

  
“The day after the world ends,” Crowley said, with his head in the grasses and undergrowth, Aziraphale’s hand in his hair, their stomachs sticky against one another, cum slicking the earth beneath his ass. “Can that be our date, angel?”  
“What?” Aziraphale asked, his mouth against Crowley’s chest. The air smelled like blackberry flowers.  
“Can we marry each other then? Really marry, I mean. Ring, every--you know. All that.”  
“Yes,” said Aziraphale, after only a second of silence. He breathed out. “The end of the world, then. That gives a bit of time to plan.”

  
To be fair, at that time there were several apocalyptic predictions in effect. London astrologers had calculated the end of the world to begin in 1624. Sabbatai Zevi, a Kabbalist, said things would end in 1648 (he would later claim to be the Messiah); Helisaeus Roselin said 1654; the Fifth Monarchists said 1655; Christopher Columbus, who had dabbled in prophecy, had said that 1656 or 1658 was the year things would go down. While neither Crowley or Aziraphale actually wanted the End to happen for real, and knew that it wasn’t quite time yet, it was in the general air that the end of the world was meant to be sort of soon, sometime in the next few hundred years, and humans were talking about it enough for it to be sort of a contemporary joke. They hadn’t talked about what would happen, of course, to them or anyone else, after the Battle, and they wouldn’t really seriously bring up that conversation for another few centuries. It was mainly a nice thought--that there would be a time After, that they would both somehow, nonsensically, be there.

  
“Or,” Crowley said, beginning to lift his head up from the ground so he could gauge the angel’s facial expression, “sooner, if you like.”  
Aziraphale took in another deep breath, hard, and looked up through his eyelashes at Crowley in a way that would always unsettle the demon’s heartbeat. “Yes,” he said. “Are you considering the practicalities of this, dear?”  
“I’m not fussy. The only thing is,” Crowley said, stroking Aziraphale’s hair and neck, smirking, “you have to find a place that’s nicer than the palace King James gave George Villiers.”  
Aziraphale had laughed. “That’s a given,” he said.  
It was a joke, but it wasn’t. Both of them understood it to be a real question and a real answer. They both wanted it. It was impossible, but impossible things happen.

In 1725, the self-appointed constables enforcing order in London along various lines had already begun to harass brothels, bars, alehouses and mollyhouses. The popular jailbreaker, master thief and lady’s man Jack Sheppard, had been caught and finally hanged the previous year, though some popular myths held that his mauled remains had been resurrected through the power of collective will and he was hiding somewhere in Wales, or at Wright’s house in London. Before his death he had escaped Newgate four times, each time using small metal files and his small frame to slip through bars and clamber across roofs. He was such a famous thief and such a famous ladies’ man that a common excuse for women caught with stolen goods was that Jack had given them a present.  
Crowley and Aziraphale had both met Jack at Mother Clap’s, when he was there with the girlfriend Bess, who people joked about because she was so tall and stately and he so short and odd. He was known to be handsome in his way, because of his confidence. Jack was smaller than Crowley, effeminate-looking, with slightly strange proportions, a prematurely receding hairline, and scant if any beard. He took a liking to Crowley, almost at once, and Crowley suspected it was because of their similarly unimpressive facial hair. Jack had it a little backwards about Crowley and Aziraphale, treating Aziraphale as if he was Crowley’s moll rather than the other way around, which amused both of them. Crowley thought Jack seemed a decent enough little man, and though his chivalrous nature went, strictly speaking, against demonic intent, he got approval to assist him, for the sake of destabilizing the State and Church with popular myth. When Jack finally was brought to be hanged, almost a quarter of a million people went to see him die, celebrate his life, and toast him, and many of them tried to climb or topple the scaffold, stopped only by mounted guards on horses. Crowley had seen to it quietly that Jack’s comatose body--not in fact dead after hanging, because of his size, not dead even after being carried around by a mob and then buried-- was dug up by a doctor Crowley knew. After healing, he was taken up north. Crowley didn’t let on about this, because martyrdom and myth would be much more in Jack’s long-term interests, though Aziraphale knew.

  
Among Jack’s friends, and indeed among almost everyone in London but particularly mollies, there was a general sense that it was noble to be a thief or a criminal and to stand against the new constabulary. The rich had too much money, the police served the rich, and to fight or thwart or mock them was heroism. Anyone who snitched on a beau, for buggery or theft or murder or anything else, to the Crown, was immediately shut out from every good house in London and described as a “no-good Bitch” between friends.  
On the night they wed, there wasn’t a raid, though one happened a few days later. It was a Wednesday. After all the buildup, they had selected a day rather spontaneously, almost by accident, because the angel was too chicken to actually act unless prompted. What happened was-- Aziraphale had had the dress in his house for a month, hadn’t shown it to Crowley. One day Crowley had been rummaging for a clean set of trousers in Aziraphale’s wardrobe and had seen the neat box.

  
“What’s that, then? Another fancy patterned vest?” he had asked. “Do they ever give you trouble over vanity?”  
“Not at all,” Aziraphale said, and this was fairly true. Vanity was one sin most angels in Heaven tended to have in common. “But it isn’t for me.”  
Crowley had looked over at him, curiously, and Aziraphale had reddened. “Well, you found it,” he said. “Which I suppose means I can’t keep it from you, can I.”  
The demon opened the box and drew out the dress. He looked at it, held it up to himself, looked at the angel. His face was unreadable, his eyebrows raised.  
“It’s ah, a wedding dress,” Aziraphale finally clarified.  
“This was expensive,” Crowley said. “How have you entered it in your logbooks?”  
“They don’t really keep track of what things cost,” Aziraphale said. “I put it down as a coat.”  
“I should feel emasculated by this, angel,” Crowley said, looking in the mirror, his tone trying to affect sarcasm but somehow failing, slightly cracking at the end of his sentence. “You’ve put thought into this. Pearls and things on it. Is this how you wished I dressed all the time?”  
Aziraphale moved close behind him and put his arms around the demon and the dress held up to his front. “I wish that you didn’t need to wear anything at all,” he said. “But I think it would be fun, to get married in it. It can be a coat, after, if you like.”  
Crowley shivered against him. “Got a palace?”  
“We have,” Aziraphale said. “It won’t be observed by Heaven, but it’ll do for now.”  
“Is this my whole wedding-present, or do you have anything else to give me?”  
“I can make you with child,” Aziraphale growled playfully, though this was not, they had determined, actually possible.  
“Eccleston at Mother Clap’s doesn’t know a damn thing of Latin,” Crowley said. “Can you give me your own promises?”  
“I can give you a ketubah,” Aziraphale said, again in a joking voice. By that time there were Jews legitimately in England again, though he knew he could never actually meet with a rabbi to draw up a marriage agreement to wed a demon. “One we drew up.”  
“I don’t think we’d better do that,” Crowley said, after a minute where he craned his head around and studied Aziraphale with a mixture of total devotion and careful scrutiny. “Imagine them finding that. You’d regret it, too. If we ever fought again.” Which, they both knew, was really a when, whether fighting of their own accord or in the Last Battle.  
“Well, then, you can read over someone else’s sometime, and know I guarantee you the same rights.”  
“The rights to clothing, food, and getting thoroughly fucked? I already get those. I get company. I get conversation...” he trailed off.  
“Try on the dress,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley wore the dress, and did his hair up, though Wilhelmina and Dipsy and Mary at Mother Clap’s insisted that he be called the groom and Aziraphale be the lady in the dances, partly because of silliness about the angel’s mannerisms and the fact that his voice was higher, and partly because at that time Aziraphale still could not lead a dance and tripped several times while trying to do a two-step with Crowley, holding his waist, in the middle of the room. Margert Clap brought them a bouquet of country roses with the leaves ripped off. The songs started out as ordinary ballads, about ancient mythical gods and saints and then bawdy popular rhymes you could put your friends’ names into, then finally popular ballads about the pleasures of sex, which Dipsy (known as Miss Irons in some circles, because of her day-trade as a blacksmith) had recently modified into being specifically about buggery. Choral music at weddings for women and men would not be introduced at large for another century and a half, but you could not be at a mollyhouse for more than four seconds without someone either starting to sing or singing over the top of someone else singing, so while Eccleston recited as much as he could remember of the rites of marriage, Dipsy was screaming in the back over the noise of a fiddle,

  
“Let the Fops of the Town upbraid  
Us, for an unnatural Trade,  
We value not Man nor Maid;  
But among our own selves we'll be free,  
But among ourselves be free.  
We'll kiss and we'll Swive  
Behind we will drive,  
And we will contrive  
New Ways for Lechery,  
New Ways oh Lechery.”

  
When she stood on top of the bar and kicked the coffee-pot, everyone broke into applause, including Eccleston, though he then tackled her off the furniture and told her to respect the sanctity of holy union. She play-fought against him.  
“You don’t even know the words to the Holy Lord’s Prayer in Latin, you rose-cheeked little swinelet,” she shouted. “I know the Godly prayers.”  
“Do you?” Crowley shouted. “Let’s have them, then.”  
She looked at the assembled half-drunk crowd and winked conspicuously. She was a silly, friendly, bearded Your Highness of a molly, and everyone liked her.  
She turned to Crowley and Aziraphale.  
“By the Lord and all His glorious light  
Fuck your new wife’s hole so tight  
That when she sits on Sunday morning  
She should still feel her bowels storming.”

“Really,” Aziraphale said quietly, but he inclined his head toward Crowley’s neck and kissed him. Anything outside the room, let alone Heaven or Hell, seemed very far away.  
Another cheer went up.  
“You may kiss Her Highness, dear,” Eccleston said.

There was a back room, where mollies went to fuck. The custom was that one molly would carry the other back there, and Aziraphale did the carrying, lifting Crowley in his arms.  
They left the door open, because that was also custom, and because neither cared at that moment enough to shut it.

Wilhelmina had several years ago set to a tune Ned Ward’s famous anti-sodomy pamphlet poem, and she knew the fiddle. Ned Ward hated sodomites, but the problem was that sodomites loved rhymes, and anything that rhymed and was about them was immediately turned into a call and response song of jubilation.  
Wilhelmina sang, and Crowley and Aziraphale both could hear:  
“But Sodomites their Wives forsake,  
Unmanly Liberties to take,  
And fall in Love with one another,  
As if no Woman was their Mother:  
For he that is of Woman born,  
Will to her Arms again return;  
And surely never chuse to play  
His Lustful Game, the backward Way.  
But since it has appear'd too plain,  
There are such Brutes that pass for Men;  
May he that on the Rump so doats,  
Be Damn'd as deep as Doctor Oates  
(Damned as deep as doctor Oates)”.

**Author's Note:**

> Almost all research in this stems from Rictor Norton's work on homosexuality in 18th century England. Explore more here: http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/index.htm
> 
> (he's transphobic, so read between the lines about trans women). 
> 
> This work features/is in debt to FTM Jack Sheppard as appears in Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg.


End file.
